


never be struck out

by scioscribe



Category: Justified
Genre: Gen, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-21
Updated: 2016-09-21
Packaged: 2018-08-16 13:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8104942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Post-"Bulletville," Raylan goes to take care of the bodies--and the graves--in the woods.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to ossapher for saying this should have a home.

None of the graves went to six feet, but there were a few that weren’t far from that. The earliest of them, probably. Raylan thought about all the shovel-work it must have taken to dig even one; he held off before he did the multiplication to know how many hours it would have been for Boyd, total. 

He didn’t know that he wanted to know that. Boyd always had been stubborn, but it took a special kind of steel in a man’s spine to keep him upright and walking after burying that many bodies, especially since he’d taken a beating just a little while before. If Raylan felt anything over Boyd—and, having let him run, he supposed he must have—it was a slight distaste at undoing all that work, at watching heavy scoops cut through the ground easy as knives through butter. It made mockery of what had gone before it.

He wondered if it had made Boyd’s hands bleed.

There’d been no help for having the bodies dug up again—Boyd had told him about the massacre out in the woods, and he had a responsibility to not let dead men rot underground polluting the water as like as not, and their deaths going unaccounted for to their families—but he thought that, all the same, he owed it to Boyd, somehow, to watch.

 _They strike at the shepherd so the sheep may scatter_ , but in the end, it hadn’t been anything like. The reverse of it, and the reverse of Dewey Crowe’s blunder, too: they’d struck at the shepherd, but it was the sheep who’d gotten struck out. And scattered to their separate graves.

He stayed until it was done. One of the workmen came over to Raylan, swabbing his brow with a slightly stained fast food napkin. “Hell,” he said. “There’s seventeen men here. You got any notion how long it’s going to take to bury them all? How much work that’s gonna be? Just finding a place for them, it’ll be an everlasting pain in the—" 

“I have some idea,” Raylan said.

“And nobody’s gonna pay for it,” the man said. “Not from what I heard about these people. So that’s state graves and pine boxes, taxpayers eating the expenses, too. Nobody pays.”

Seventeen holes in the ground, and the only shovel he’d found near the place was one with a blade that wobbled a little when it struck against the earth. “Somebody paid the first time around. Now do your goddamn job.”


End file.
